FWIW, I don't believe Bernstein is evil.
I do believe he has increasingly argued in bad faith and alienated his peers to the point that they're (we're) unwilling to engage with him, which from the outside can look like his points are unrefutable.
I do believe he has increasingly argued in bad faith and alienated his peers to the point that they're (we're) unwilling to engage with him, which from the outside can look like his points are unrefutable.
If he's turned so crank-y that his peers simply no longer engage with him beyond the strictly necessary, then this all looks a bit different.
I'd still love to see some of his specific criticisms addressed, but that becomes a minor point...
Cranks and assholes occasionally are unfairly treated, but generally are fairly ignored - the effort of dealing with their claims aren't worth it.
As an outsider, "respected cryptographer makes a narrow technical claim and is brushed off by NIST" and "sore loser that no-one talks to complains that people aren't entertaining his latest complaint about the ref" are very different situations, from which I will take very different actions.
This is looking more and more like the latter!
Just to be sure, this is not how I see it at all. I'm relatively convinced that the thing isn't backdoored rather than buying into this particular conspiracy theory.
But yeah, in general that is a risk when one doesn't engage despite disagreeing